To the rites of middle-age passage, some families are adding another: buying marijuana for aging parents.
Florence, 89, an artist who lives in New York, smokes mainly for relief from her spinal stenosis — usually one or two puffs before going to sleep, she said. She buys her pipes through an online shop and gets her marijuana from her daughter, Loren, who is 65.
“A person brings it to me,” said Loren, who uses marijuana recreationally. “I’m not out on a street corner.” Florence said that she had told all of her doctors that she was using marijuana, and that none had ever discouraged her or warned of interactions with her prescription drugs, including painkillers.
“I think I’ve influenced my own physician on the subject,” she said. “She came to me and asked me for some for another patient.”
I knew some kids whose parents smoked weed, and they grew up thinking it was something old folks did so they didn't do it. They're grown now and have wised up.
I like to lump myself in with old folks who are smart. The circle has come around, and old folks vote. I think California is going to have legal weed come November.
Related: The view from Canuckistan.
Going its own way as only California can, an otherwise grumpy left-coast electorate is clearly tilted toward outright legalization on Nov. 2. But good luck sorting the yeas and nays.
On the Yes side you’ll find everyone from doctors to lawyers to Facebook founders to the state’s largest public service union. And plenty of retired drug warriors, who no longer see weed as a demon worthy of the fight. Even some Tea Partiers bidding to end prohibition in the spirit of government-shrinking libertarianism. For many, the argument that ‘if you can’t beat it, tax it’ is the glue that binds in a time of extreme budget crisis.
The Nos, meanwhile, are lined up in a mismatch worthy of Monty Python. Here you will find old-school Reefer Madness rejectionists shoulder to shoulder with ethically challenged pot farmers and the cops who would jail them — all agitating for the status quo of more war, albeit for starkly different reasons. Soccer moms, polls show, worry the ballot initiative known as Proposition 19 will bring proliferation. Beer breweries worry about market share. Small-time growers and cartels alike worry about the taxman.
Whatever happens, a substantial legal battle seems like in the event of a Yes vote — one which could involve the Obama administration, which has yet to signal how it will respond to California taking a legalized leap on what remains classified a Schedule 1 controlled substance under federal law.
“I don’t see the feds coming in with guns blazing. Even under George W. Bush there was only one single tokenistic raid in Humboldt County,” said Hoover, the Arcata publisher.
“But the fact right now is we’ve got these four sets of laws — federal, state, county and city — none of which agree. And if we can change to remove the faux medical mantle over it, great. When you have guys in leather baseball hats running around saying, ‘Yo, I’m a medical care provider, dude,’ you just shake your head. We can do better.”
Yes We Can! Wow, déjà vu all over again...
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